Royal lookalikes speak up for Cornish, one of several British languages that have also had revival campaignsDavid Parry/PA

The last speaker of the Jeru language died aged 85 on the Andaman Islands where there was no one left who could talk to her in her mother tongue. But the extinction may not be permanent thanks to a £20 million project.

Boa Senior, who died in 2010, helped researchers to record the moribund language as part of a programme run by the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Jeru is one of 400 languages that have been saved for posterity in an archive funded by Arcadia, a charity established by Lisbet Rausing from the fortune she inherited from her family’s invention of Tetra Pak cartons.

The endangered languages documentation programme is seeking to save 3,500 languages that would otherwise…